Equity

Hark, all ye who pay attention to the stock market, for Elon Musk's wheels-focused company broached the $1 trillion market cap threshold today. Yeah, it finally happened, so the Equity team quickly scrambled for the microphones. Chris put together the show, allowing Alex and Kirsten to dive into the matter. Kirsten, in case you aren't familiar with her, is TechCrunch's transportation editor -- her crew handles everything that moves under its own power for the team. She's tremendous. Aside from the obvious market cap point, we got into: What news drove Tesla higher today, leading to its new valuation record? How is Tesla's overall financial performance looking? Has the model mix at the company changed over time? And, because Alex was curious, why Telsa cars all look the same when will the Cybertruck will come to market? In short, it was a very fun Twitter shot. Cheers, and Equity is back Wednesday with our regular programming.   Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryc

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. Taking a look around the world, stocks were largely higher in Asia and Europe and are looking somewhat mixed in the United States. There are a host of technology earnings coming this week, mind. Facebook is taking all sorts of incoming fire from media reporting on a trove of documents that a whistleblower leaked. The company is not having a good month, let along quarter from a PR perspective. It reports earnings later today. Here's the NYTimes piece we noted, the Bloomberg article, the CNN piece, and the Verge entry. The PayPal-Pinterest deals is done for now. PayPal said so this morning. Its shares are up, while Pinterest shares are sharply lower. And from startup-land: Routine is a new app that looks slick, Billie raised $100 millio

This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more broadly. We naturally kicked off with news that Facebook intends to rebrand itself. Which we don't think will do much to detract from its various crises. But the news does underscore that Facebook is, in fact, serious about writing its next chapter. From there it was time to talk funding rounds. This week we picked Vertical Oceans and its fishy plans, Superplastic and its stable of rude digital critters, and Modern Age and its plan to help us all age a bit more gracefully. Vibe Capital, founded by Teachable's Ankur Nagpal, is a $60 million fund for international, scrappy founders. We spoke about the founder to investor pipeline, and why everyone wants eachother's jobs. And then Alex ran us through some data from the Chinese venture capital market, information that was far more positive than we anticipated. Given, you know, t

Look, we don't get it either. Taking some time as a group to sit around and chat through the possibly impending PayPal-Pinterest deal, Natasha and Alex didn't wind up cracking the story. Which makes some sense, as investors sent PayPal stock down 5% on the news, implying that they didn't really get it either. Recall that PayPal has made a few other deals in recent years, including buying Honey ($4 billion) and Paidy (less than $4 billion). Regardless, the transaction -- worth potentially dozens of billions -- could scoot the social giant into the welcoming arms of PayPal, an American consumer and business fintech giant. Here's what we tried to sort out: Does Pinterest have a big enough ecommerce story to make the deal line up with our first expectations? We talked about Pinterest's historical stock performance, as well as a number of culture controversies it has been embroiled in. Why doesn't PayPal just buy Etsy instead? Here we dug into why a shop-able, searchable mood-board may satisfy customer demands,

Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the recent NerdWallet IPO filing, and what it can tell us about how the written word -- in its digital form -- can still be worth quite a lot. Here's an outline of the chat: NerdWallet shows the financial power of the written word, even if it isn't the precise form of writing that we know and love. Automattic is a large, startup bet on the written word, amongst other things. Danny had notes for us on the scale of its business, thanks to a new TC-1 all about the publishing empire. Here we talked about the importance of proving value internally, before going external with word power. And from Kindle Vella to Substack to Memberful from Patreon, there are more and more models for getting paid to write these days. Hell, you can charge for your tweets now. We were left with questions about if the return of text is inevitable, in an everyone-runs-to-video world. As Natasha notes, distribution is still a bottleneck and human attention is not entirely predisposed

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. This week, the week of October 18, 2021, kicked off with a mixed markets picture. Asian stocks were mixed, down in Europe, and set to fall in the United States. China remains a concern. There are hardware events this week from Apple, Samsung and Google. Along with earnings from Netflix, IBM, and Qualtrics. Amazon is in hot water with American regulators, China may force its tech giants to allow for cross-platform search, and Facebook wants to hire lots of Europeans. From startup-land, Enpal landed a huge dollop of cash for its solar work, while OfficeRnD made bets on a hybrid working future. Notes to come shortly on the Expensify IPO filing. The show is back on Wednesday! Chat then! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsol

In today's episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on. Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a Twitter Space to discuss Microsoft's decision to pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market, a move that lit up headlines around the world. That LinkedIn was still in China in 2021 may feel more surprising than the news that it will exit that particular market, but the moment matters all the same as it marks the end of an experiment -- could a mega-tech company have a US HQ and a first-party service live in China? Er, no, it turns out. Not really. Microsoft found itself jammed between its own ethics, and governmental censure. It was a lose-lose for the company, so pulling the plug was the smart move. The company isn't going to miss the revenue. For startups, the Microsoft decision is a good reminder that doing business in China is at a minimum very hard for non-Chinese companies, and perhaps impossible. Recall that Microsoft h

This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed through tech difficulties, crypto puns, and fintech CAC. It's called coping. Here's what we got into: Magic Leap raised $500 million about which we have thoughts, Mindbody's acquisition of ClassPass caught our eye for obvious reasons (and the fact that it also raised $500 million), and we dug into SoWork's fascinating business proposition. mPharma and the race to horizontal, holistic mental health: Telehealth is great and useful but no panacea. However, in the realm of mental health it's potentially life-changing for millions. OpenSea went from being one of the main characters in our fraud show, to being the underdog that we're rooting for - now that Coinbase is building a copycat. Since we tried to keep the show tight, a ton of news was left on the cutting room floor. The good news, though, is that we're ba

This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Fashion. Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the world of fashion resale and rental. It's no small market, giving birth to both public companies, unicorns, and startups. Most recently, well-known fashion rental player Rent the Runway filed to go public, giving us a window in its own numbers. Those figures led us to a few questions about how best to go about making money from clothes in a retail context. From our chat: Selling vs. Renting vs. Reselling: To start, we wanted to help you group startups into three buckets: those who sell customers to people, those who rent goods to customers, and those who resell pre-owned goods to customers. Rent the Runway's numbers: We had some issues with Rent the Runway's business model given that it appears that the company is simply underpricing its clothing items given its cost structure. How Wall Street will price the company, or whether Rent the Runway is hop

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. Markets were busy, with Chinese tech stocks rallying and the rest of the world posting a mix of gains and losses. If you are bullish on public markets, excellent. But if you are bearish, don't worry -- there are diverse enough signals out this morning to satisfy any investing thesis. Facebook goes on American political TV: To talk about changes it is going to make to its product. A product that it built. It wants point for fixing the thing it made broken. Sure. And Tesla, after delaying the roll-out of a beta for Full Self Driving, is also being asked by some in India to build cars in that country. CRED is raising even more money, at an even higher valuation. Mono gets the Tiger imprimatur, which matters as the startup could prove

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups. Before we hop into this week's topics, you can follow the show on Twitter, where we rather often host impromptu Twitter spaces that sometimes become episodes. Come hang! Here's the rundown for this week: Chalo raises $40M to improve bus transit in India: This startup wins name (and startup) of the week. Chalo wants to tackle inefficiencies in India's bus system, so we noodle over why that makes sense and what challenges could be ahead. Masterworks raises $110M for fractional art ownership: Call it a Series A if you must, but the megaround that Masterworks just raised helps underscore the global shift towards alternative investing, and fractional ownership. How long until we get Masterwor

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Gaming. Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to discuss the gaming world from a few perspectives, including those of startups and the largest platform players in tech. Alex is a gamer. Danny is a board gamer. And Natasha isn't big on digital games. So, we had a good array of viewpoints. The goal of our episode was to understand why gaming is garnering more interest from Big Tech and startups alike, and how the business model and environment has evolved over the years. Here's what we got into: A new gaming fund from a16z, and recent venture capital totals, as compiled by our friends over at Crunchbase News. Amazon's new hit game, and Apple's epic gaming profits. It appears, by our read, that the gaming industry has evolved from single-sale titles to games with recurring incomes that s

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. Sorry that the show is so delayed today, it's utterly my fault. Regular service returns Wednesday, and we'll make to not be late on a Monday again this year! Here's what we got into on the show: Tech shares are falling in America in a larger domestic selloff -- but once again we're seeing high-valued technology stocks lose the most ground. Software companies are having a particularly rough morning. The Facebook whistleblower situation remains the biggest news item in the technology world this morning, dominating aggregators and conversation. Precisely what comes next isn't clear, I reckon, but Facebook shares haven't lost enough ground yet to be a worry for the firm; that could change with another few days' declines, however. What else

To cap the week off, Danny and Alex and Chris got together live on Twitter to chat through the demise of the Zoom-Five9 deal. Those of you who remember how recently the deal was announced are likely a little surprised -- how did it fall apart so quickly? Well, a few reasons: There could be inherent risk in all-stock transactions provided a rapidly-changing market. It may be the case that Zoom simply did not bid enough for Five9. And there's a mix of anti-trust and national regulatory issues to the deal that never got fully hammered out. So, you can pick your poison, even though the answer appears to be some of each above point. https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/19/the-zoom-five9-deal-is-a-big-bet-for-the-video-conferencing-company/ Those of you who caught the Friday episode will wonder, and fairly, what the end of the Zoom-Five9 deal will have on other M&A activity. We talked about it. That's enough for now. Hit play and have a laugh with us. Thanks for sticking with the show! Credits: Equity is produced b

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, meaning that we were running full-strength for our roundup of this super busy week. Before we hop into the topics, you can follow the show on Twitter -- all the cool kids do! -- and keep in mind that on Mondays Equity provides a short kickoff to the week, we chat a single topic on Wednesdays, and Fridays are when we go through the full week. Make sense? Hell yeah: Fiveable Cobalt raised $2.8 million to help creators build and sell more stuff. As part of our continuing focus on creators more broadly, we had a few questions! Found came out of stealth with $32 million in total funding from GV, Atomic and Define Ventures. The startup is focused on "weight care management" and it's notable that the co-founder of Atomic, which incubated this company, also co-founded hims and hers -- which also has a telehealth component. Found's new CEO is the former COO of Bumble, who drafted its S-1 while getting chemo treatment fo

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We got the crew together — Natasha and Danny and Alex — this time 'round to talk fraud, one of our favorite topics. Sure, we've riffed on the ups and downs at Luckin, and we've spent more time talking about WeWork's implosion than we want to admit. But that's not the most recent stuff. There's been a raft of fraud lately which caught our eye. The heart of today's episode is a question about fraud, and what more of it might mean: Does more fraud indicate that we're in a growing bubble, or that we're in the later-stages of a bubble about to burst? Here's what we got into to help us understand our question: OpenSea admits incident as top exec is accused of trading NFTs on insider information -- NFTs are good fun until the market for them is bent in the favor of insiders! Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong -- How to not get money from Goldman Sach

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. A few things this morning: Instagram is pausing work on the kids-focused version of its social service. It claims that the product is the right thing to build, but that it wants to talk to folks about why, first. TechCrunch has more here. Shares of Box are up this morning, after the company endured a period of time in the wilderness. Google is cutting its cloud app marketplace take rate as marketplaces more broadly lose their ability to accrete economic value as middlepeople. Spotify is spending to advertise its advertising solution so that others can spend more money on Spotify. Swiss startup Frontify raises $50 million, more than double its previous round's size. And from Sweden, EV company Polestar may go public via a SPAC, as EV

And the winner of TC's Startup Battlefield is.... gonna have to listen to find out  Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Today we got the gang together -- Natasha and Danny and Alex -- to chat about the most recent IPOs in tech-land, namely debuts from Freshworks and Toast. TechCrunch has covered their pair of firms somewhat closely during their IPO run, as they each have some notable characteristics: Freshworks' IPO provided a fresh window into how public market investors are willing to value growth-oriented software companies out the gate. The news is good. Which means that we could see more unicorns looking to list in coming months. Toast's IPO provided a lens by which we could gauge public-market sentiment for hybrid software-and-payments companies. The answer? That the stock market is pretty dang enthused about the companies in question. So it's a good news day for unicorns, for tech startups, and for Boston, a city that Danny has many thoughts about. Please send him your complaints, and not

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet. A few things this morning: I shook up the show format a little, including how the script came together and how it was organized. Hit me up on Twitter if you have notes. Disrupt is this week, so strap thyself in for the best tech event of the year, coming to your living room. The Equity team is hosting -- between the group of us -- a zillion panels and one of the two stages. Come hang out with us. It's going to be on heck of a show. On the news front, the global stock market is taking a whacking. US stocks are set to fall after European stocks went lower thanks to concerns that the Chinese property developer Evergrande and its constituent debt issues could spread to other parts of the market, possibly leading to contagion. Cryptos are